1 answer

One of the best ways to check if your edits have been saved is to check your edit history. You can also check the edit history of the article.

To check your entire edit history, click on the "contributions" tab on the right top portion of the page.

Clicking on this will bring up your entire edit history, organized by default from most recent to your earliest.

Another way to check your edits is to look at a page history, if you're concerned with your edits on a specific entry. If you select the tab that says "View history" you will get to see the edit history of the page, complete with user names and time stamps of when the edits were made. If the user left an edit summary (and you should do this with live articles) then you will be able to see this as well.

Now if you're asking why an edit you've made isn't showing up in your edit history or in the page history at all, it may be because you weren't signed in. If you aren't signed in then your edits will show up under an IP address. I don't recommend editing under an IP address since it's harder for your instructor to see what you've done and there are many places on Wikipedia that do not allow people to edit if they're not signed in.

It's also possible that you didn't save the page completely when you last tried to save. This is actually pretty easy to do even if you're trying to be very careful - even if you've been editing for years. Sometimes it's because the edit screen was left open for so long (typically many, many hours) or because you hit preview and didn't hit save. When I edit I always try to remember this old gaming mantra: "Save early and save often!" Try to save every once in a while when you're editing and break your editing into chunks. Not only does this make it less likely that you'll skip over the save button but it may also make it easier to spot any errors you make while editing.